Exclusive: Editor Joi McMillon On The Underground Railroad & Working Again With Barry Jenkins
Currently streaming on Amazon Prime is Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins’ miniseries The Underground Railroad, which features an alternate timeline of the real-life titular underground network of secret routes and safe houses that was created in the mid-19 century that was used by enslaved African-Americans to escape to free states. Amazon Prime will release the project but hasn’t selected a release date.
Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, The Underground Railroad follows Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia who is an outcast even amongst her fellow Africans and is struggling coming into womanhood when she meets Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia who informs her of the Underground Railroad, inspiring them both to take the risk and escape to freedom.
The 11-episode limited series will chronicle Cora’s journey as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. After escaping her Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the southern soil.
Starring Thuso Mbedu, Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre and Joel Edgerton. It will also feature Damon Herriman, William Jackson Harper, Amber Gray, Jim Klock, Lily Rabe, Fred Hechinger, and Owen Harn, the series was co-edited by Joi McMillon, who received an Academy Award nomination for her work on Jenkins’ Moonlight. She also worked on If Beale Street Could Talk, Janizca Bravo’s Lemon & Zola, and Jenkins’ upcoming Lion King prequel.
BlackFilmandTV.com’s Wilson Morales caught up with McMillon as spoke about working on a limited series as opposed to a film and the chemistry she has with Jenkins.